After several months spent listening to the ideas and concerns of ordinary residents — the people who run our small businesses, teach our kids, service our cars and make the products we ship all over the world — the Transformers now move to the far-more-difficult task of chiseling a masterpiece from the raw material of public opinion quarried from a series of community visioning sessions.

After all, human beings are bundles of DNA and dreams, sprinkled with the concerns of everyday living. It’s fun to talk about our visions for self, family and community.

The trick is to turn the myriad dreams of the hundreds of people who have participated in Transform Rockford sessions into a single, powerful vision for the entire community. And then, how do you turn the broad community vision into concrete strategies that will slowly but surely propel Rockford toward the top of those “best of” lists?

Those are tough tasks in the best of circumstances and will be made tougher if egos, turf wars, long-held grudges, and old ways of doing things foul the Transform process.

The Transform Rockford leadership team — Woodward CEO Tom Gendron, executive director Mike Schablaske and the dozen or so members of the steering committee — cannot control what goes on outside of the Transform process.

What they can control, however, might be more important, and that’s their own fidelity to the shared values guiding Transform Rockord.

Taken together, those values are the gold standard for civil conduct, and heaven knows, we need civility wherever we can find it.

Let’s focus for the moment on just two of those values — transparency and inclusion.

Transparency requires the Transform brain trust to be open about their intentions and their processes with the public — and with one another.

As the work gets harder, it’s only natural that the Transformers themselves will settle into factions. If that happens, information will be less freely shared within the Transform leadership, let alone with the rest of us. Information, after all, is power.

Resist that temptation, Transformers. You’ve done a remarkable job to date of galvanizing community interest in your work by presenting a united front. Keep it up.

Inclusion requires that the Transform movement reach into every nook and cranny of the community, touching residents of all colors, the disadvantaged and the well-heeled, the well-educated and dropouts, west side and east side. Everybody gets a seat at the table.

As the process unfolds, the easy choice will be to turn a deaf ear to those quarters of the community that lack the sharply honed communications skills that make it easy to participate in civic discourse — or to turn a blind eye to those parts of the community whose problems seem intractable.

Page 2 of 2 - Resist that temptation, too. People left on the margins tend to stay there.

Transform Rockford remains a work in progress. No surprise there.

And it’s led by human beings, none of whom are perfect. We get that, too.

But great things await if the Transform Rockford leadership remains faithful to its shared values.